[NFBCS] THOUGHTS ON PASSWORD PROTECTED PDF FILES

[Brian Buhrow]

	Hello everyone!  Yesterday I learned a little something about password protected pdf files
I thought folks might find useful.

It is my usual practice to run pdf files through pdftotext, part of the poppler open source pdf
tools package.  In particular, I usually use the -layout option, to, as much as possible, preserve
the print layout of the original pdf file.

Yesterday I discovered the Poppler tools can extract the text and images from password
protected pdf files without the password.  I don't know if this is true for all password
protected files, but it certainly was handy for the particular file I was working with, since
Acrobat Reader wouldn't show me anything without the password, which I didn't have.

I figured out that it is possible to check to see if this trick will work by using the pdfinfo
command from the same package.  If the output from the pdfinfo command says the file is locked
or password protected, but the printing capability is enabled, you'll be able to extract the
text and images from the file using the pdftotext or pdftoppm commands respectively.  If the
text you  get is insufficient or you need the images for some other reason, this is an
excellent way to work around a password on a locked pdf file.

-thanks
-Brian